That’s Enough

If you were to hang out with me and really get to know me, chances are very good you wouldn’t like what you see. 
Just this statement alone lifts God’s love and grace for us to a whole new level. Like it or not, we are all performers, and we do our best to control the elements so that the script sheds a positive light upon our life’s work.
But sooner or later we discover that this task, in the long run, is both impossible and a huge waste of our precious time. Dust happens on the lens and dirt stains the bright white outfits that we picked out so carefully to impress our audience.
If we don’t look up to where our salvation truly originates, we will be stomped to death in the stampede of the failure we can’t avoid.
Life, this side of heaven, might promise us an alluring paradise but there is no delivery service that can produce what we are diligently looking for.
Escape is no real alternative as it only masks the inability to solve the problem on our own. Since we were young, everyone has been asking, ‘What will you do?”
Today I have the guts to reply, “Who cares what I do if it only prohibits me from being authentic and coming clean?”
I have experienced quite shockingly that God is not my ticket to ride; He is my only avenue of ever working it out.
And yet even with my life totally surrendered to Him, I am not exempt from the drama and pain that come with breathing the air this earth has to offer.
You can’t have it all if you won’t admit the good, bad and ugly that comes with it.
I believe that Christianity has suffered from those who have exerted way too much energy in homogenizing it rather than preaching the heart and soul of it.
The ‘Good News” of Jesus has nothing to do with promises of a better existence here. It doesn’t even guarantee easier times and never-fail days.
Followers of Jesus have physical deficiencies, emotional hang-ups, anxiety issues and terrible days that turn into adventurous seasons where God is not the way out but the only way in to making sense out of the misery and mining the golden nuggets from the cavernous caves we can’t avoid no matter how hard we may try. Faith must be willing to get its work clothes on.
If there will be fruit growing in our garden, then there will be both the expectation of weeds and the understanding that the sin isn’t that they are there, but the ignorance of covering them without pulling them up.
Believers shouldn’t be asking, “What am I doing wrong?” when nothing seems to be right. We should be looking for the Lord in all the right places.
Healing is not just making blind eyes to see and lame legs to walk. Healing is also making blind eyes, in spite of the continuous and aggravating blindness, being able to blaze miraculous trails into the great unknown.
It is living with the weakness and watching God still using you in remarkable fashion.
No, it isn’t the way any of us would draw it up, but it still is divine intervention. If I wait until all is as it should be to write my psalm of worship, it might sit unfinished and unheard.
So I sing with my blood boiling, and I raise my hands in defiant revolution that this world can do me in. What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul?
It’s all about soul. It has very little to do with happiness. Jesus didn’t have a home to call his own, and he was battered and beaten up by those who shared history with him.
I don’t think the Lord would call his time with us a vacation, a trip, a holiday to the beach. I think he did what he had to do so that there would be endless hope in the cup we were given with predetermined holes.
Faith believes what God says even when it is contradicted by what we see. When nothing can change my world, the Holy Spirit still redeems me. Even when we are not privileged to all that the Lord is doing behind the scenes, we are not abandoned in ignorance.
He who began this good work will bring it to completion in his own way and time.
I want to but must not put the book away. It’s too early to run, and it’s too late to start all over again.
Give us this day our daily bread and let us hold on to the promise that “Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” If it doesn’t belong to the Creator, then the created go the route of anarchy, and nobody wins.
So on this quiet day where I can’t hear the music, I trust the songs of angels accompany me.
I will join the choir again but not today and even if nobody around me understands, the God above surely does. And that’s enough. It must be. Let it be.
ED. NOTE: The author is senior pastor of The Lighthouse Church, 1248 Route 9 South, Cape May Court House.